The feckless usefulness of the UN once again is apparent as it failed agin to come to any agreement on condemning terrorism. The opposition came primarily from the 56 OIC (Organization of Isalmic Countries)members…surprise, surprise, surprise! Who woulda ever thunk it!
A proposed U.N. convention against terrorism has been stalled since 1997. The holdup? How to define terrorism. But this is nothing more than a semantic trick. The Islamic states insist that terrorism must be defined not by the nature of the act but by its purpose. Putting a bomb in a market or train or bus is not an act of terrorism, they say, if it is done for a righteous purpose; namely national liberation or resistance to occupation. To say there is a problem of definition is to focus on a word. The real question is whether it is ever legitimate to target women, children and other noncombatants. For the Islamic states, the answer is yes.(Emphasis added)
Not only did the OIC oppose any meaningful definition of terrorism, it proposed changing the resolution to approve attacks, but it sought a refaffirmation of language in a 1970 resolution: “reaffirm[ing] … the legitimacy of the struggle of the colonial peoples and peoples under alien domination to exercise their right to self-determination and independence by all the necessary means at their disposal.”
The final phrase is euphemistic language included to implicitly approve terrorism. In the current action, the US claimed a partial victory by stopping such a reaffirmation.
If this is the best that can be hoped for from the UN, then we would be well served to bail out, and then to send them all packing off to Geneva or somewhere, anywhere away from the U.S.